Nett: Scope of problem is an unavoidable hole in the Kitec story

Sunday

Last week's look at the Kitec plumbing issue was one of those stories that leave reporters feeling a little edgy.

It wasn't easy handing the story off to the city desk with what I knew was a Grand Canyon-sized hole - the inability to be more specific about how many homes had Kitec pipe and fittings.

A gaping hole, but one we knew going into the story would be virtually impossible to fill accurately.

And I know some readers were bothered by that as well, with at least one suggestion coming in that I should have done more research about which builders used it and which didn't.

That may be an issue where the Internet has changed our expectations about hard information - there's so much data out there, someone must have kept track of this bit of minutiae somewhere.

Unfortunately, there's no such luck. Generally speaking, government building inspectors don't actually make comprehensive notes on the kinds of material used in a home. Their job is to make sure the products used on the job and the work itself conforms to code.

A couple of local facts that would have made tracking down the builders a somewhat daunting task was the mix of time, and Lubbock's preference for using the "master developer" approach to building out subdivisions.

Hard for a reporter who came here in 2008 to know who was in business, say, between 2003 and 2007 - both in terms of the residential contractors, and the plumbing companies who might have been used at the time as subs on houses.

The master developer approach simply makes tracking the issue across the city a harder task. It's one of the first lessons I've learned about doing business here.

In the Western desert growth centers - Tucson, Phoenix and Las Vegas for three - subdivisions are usually single builder affairs - one company that acquires the land, does the planning and engineering, installs the roads and infrastructure, then sells the lots, builds the houses and waits out warranty issues.

That's why the Kitec issue was readily visible in Vegas when it hit there a few years ago. Everyone on the street was going to get hit because it was related crews working almost in Levittown fashion to stand 'em up and stucco 'em out.

In Lubbock, however, a master developer acquires the land and connects with several builders to take a subdivision out to market. The result, one home inspector told me, was that you might find Kitec in two or three homes side by side on one street, then go two blocks south and one block east and there would be another house.

What else got in the way was the fact that there's really been a huge national silence about the product. A lot of national estimates, for example, say there was plenty of Kitec installed in early decade Tucson homes. I contacted my old colleagues at the morning newspaper there, and they'd heard nothing - probably because, as often happens with product liability issues, it takes more than a few isolated situations, and people saying "oh, yeah, I saw that over here" before a pattern emerges.

Weirder yet is that somehow, the news media haven't picked up on this story - a little disturbing when you consider the national lawsuit being gathered in U.S. District Court in Dallas is a consolidation so far of class action suits filed against Kitec's manufacturer, IPEX, in Alabama, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington.

Which brings us to the here and now, and things I hope folks will understand about the situation.

The other unavoidable dread for the newsie in a story such as this is "thinking past the front door." Over my career, I've heard everyone from professors to the guy at the next desk weigh in on where responsibility ends - where your concerns about how the story affects the reader should end.

In this case, my thought was about frustration and panic, and remembered a time years ago when I was waiting out the results of a biopsy, and thought that would be close to how I'd feel if I were prying at the access panel on the bulkhead behind my bathtub to see what kind of plumbing I had.

And that leads to the other sad reality of big class action cases. You, the potential victim, have the problem today. Meanwhile, in the federal court clerk's office in Dallas, the paperwork grows and grows and grows.

While the judge in the case has already selected the group of attorneys who will lead the case for the plaintiffs, much of the file is filling with applications from out of state lawyers seeking one-time permission to practice law in Texas for purposes of this case.

There's some distance to go. Big class action cases will take a long time, as people battle over who's really affected, and then what's really at issue.

Which at this point is difficult news for affected property owners, who'll have to front the costs of replacing the defective plumbing and then wait for some resolution in court.

The good news for building professionals in Lubbock is that the allegations in the case are narrowly drawn, and don't extend past IPEX to anyone who might have sold or installed it.

In essence the suit contends that the manufacturer was negligent in putting a defective product on the market and failed to honor warranties.

Break time

Something will be in this space next Sunday, but it won't be my smiling (?!?) face and another burning screed.

I'll be taking some vacation time. My plans are pretty much in the air, although power tools may be involved. Or maybe not.

I'll be back at work Oct. 4.

So until we meet again, be good humans.

To comment on this story:

walt.nett@lubbockonline.com • 766-8744

james.ricketts@lubbockonline.com • 766-8706

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